The central question of this book is: How can we design these information environments so they serve our social needs in the long term?
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who hired Frog early, noted, “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” (Page 0)
Introduction (Page 0)
In the moments during which these passengers are focused on their glass rectangles, we’ve somehow stopped being in the same place together. The boundaries of the physical environment we share no longer constrain them: they’re engaged in something—a bank transfer, a political argument, a shopping expedition, a flirtatious encounter—that’s happening somewhere else. That somewhere is very interesting to me. This is the “place” where many of us do our shopping, learning, and banking. We meet with our friends and loved ones there. It’s also where major parts of our social and civic interactions are playing out. Every year we’re spending more of our time there. (Page 0)
We’re moving more key social interactions to information systems every day. (Page 0)
Most contemporary discussion about software design frames the object of the work as a product, a tool, an interaction, or (at best) a service—all transactional and, to a greater or lesser degree, ephemeral. Software applications do have characteristics of all of these things, but they also have characteristics that make them place-like; they create contexts that influence the way we understand the world and, hence, how we act in it. Places are longer-lived than products, services, or tools; we conceive of things differently when we know they must endure. We’ve also been designing places—buildings, towns, parks, etc.—for a long time. We understand the forces that shape spaces and forms, and how they influence our behavior. As a result, there’s much that software designers can learn from architecture. (Page 0)
Environments
Whether they be websites on your notebook computer, apps on your phone, or “conversations” with the “smart” cylinder on your mantelpiece, these environments are where you catch up with your friends, work, study, find a romantic partner, bank, shop, and undertake a whole host of other activities that our forebears did in physical space. Because they are composed primarily of information—words and images on screens—we refer to them as information environments. (Page 2)
Physical Environments
When I say environment, I mean the “surroundings of a system or organism,” especially the aspects of those surroundings that “influence the system’s or organism’s behavior.” (Page 3)
We exist in a physical environment. Large parts of this environment are natural and wild, untouched by human civilization. However, most of us spend our lives in physical environments that have been reconfigured by other people toward particular ends. These “artificial” physical environments—buildings, parks, streets, towns, cities, etc.—have a great influence on our behavior. They make it possible for us to collaborate with our coworkers, sleep soundly at night, or quietly read a book. (Page 3)
When you inhabit such an environment, use it for its intended purpose, and interact with other people there, it becomes part of your mental model of the world. You start using it as a reference point in your own personal geography. When you are there, you feel, think, and act in ways that are particular to that environment. We call such environments places, and they are central in our lives. (Page 4)
Our effectiveness as individuals and societies greatly depends on how well these places serve the roles we intend for them. You may have experienced the effect that your environment has on your performance firsthand if, like many people today, you work in an open office. A friend of mine is always complaining about having to work in such a “cube farm”; her coworkers make constant noises that destroy her concentration. The quality of her work in such an environment will be different from what she would produce in a place that allowed her greater control over her attention. (Page 5)
While their primary purposes may be to give us safe locations to work, eat, learn, worship, and more, many places also meet another important need as well: they allow us to come together as a community. (Page 5)
At the physical level, a building’s form conveys to your senses the possibilities for action that it makes available to you. A wall keeps meetings private. An opening on the wall allows you to cross through to the other side. A sidewalk encourages you to walk in a particular direction. A bolted door makes it impossible for you to enter (and lets you know that’s the case). A glass storefront gives you a preview of the goods sold inside. Your senses take in these physical features of the place automatically; they let you know what you can and can’t do there. (Page 7)
Information
You can think of information as anything that helps reduce uncertainty so that you can make better predictions about outcomes. (Page 10)
It’s easy to see how signs provide information, but what about other aspects of the environment? You get lots of information from other parts of your surroundings that also influence your actions. For example, many of the forms around you have been designed to let you know how they are meant to be used. Consider how the entrance of most public buildings is carefully designed so that you can easily find it, even if you’ve never visited that particular building before. (Page 11)
Information Environments
Consider what happens when you chat with a friend using an app such as Apple Messages in one of these internet-connected devices. You and your friend are communicating in real time, even though your bodies may be physically very far from each other. While you’re chatting, neither of you are focused on your physical surroundings. Instead, your minds are operating within a context that’s defined by the chat app; the two of you are represented in the space as little images within circles, your words conveyed by speech bubbles, much like cartoon characters. The chat application becomes your shared environment, its boundaries defined by the app’s user interface much as the boundaries of a physical room are defined by its walls and ceiling. You and your friend are sharing this environment, even though you’re not physically in the same place. (Page 13)
Physical environments are not all the same. A conversation held in a confessional in a church has a very different character than one held in a beauty shop or coffee house. The same is true of information environments; a conversation that happens in Apple Messages (where you’re afforded some degree of privacy) will have a different character than one held over Twitter, which is more public. Information environments create contexts that influence our behavior and actions. (Page 14)
Wikipedia may not have a roof and walls, but it’s very much a place. It provides the structures, navigation systems, and rules of engagement that enable over 100,000 people to spend at least an hour every day working there, and for the rest of us to get delightfully lost exploring the many nooks they’ve created. 11 Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, is not so much its editor-in-chief, but rather the architect of an environment that made it possible for Wikipedia to emerge from the collective efforts of a large group of globally distributed contributors, most of whom he will never meet. Much like our monumental buildings, Wikipedia-as-place is also laden with meaning as a representative artifact of a new type of culture that works, thrives, and lives in information. No physical place could do these jobs better. (Page 18)
Software-based experiences have become central to our ability to act skillfully. Thinking about them as products, publications, or services is not serving our needs well. If we are to move our shops, schools, singles bars, and third places online, it behooves us to look at how such places have accommodated our needs successfully in the past. Approaching software design as a placemaking activity—with a focus on intended outcomes and behavior rather than on forms or interactions—results in systems that can serve our needs better in the long term. In order to do so, we first need to unpack how environments affect our behavior. (Page 19)
Context
Just as a library’s components make it possible for you to read, the components of a bank’s website or mobile application make it possible for you to do your banking. (Page 22)
Where Are You and What Can You Do There?
Physical environments—buildings, towns, cities, parks, etc.—are designed artifacts, but we experience these things differently than other designed artifacts, such as iPhones and coffee table books. We experience buildings as urban environments that we inhabit; we move around and inside them, and their forms determine what we can do at any given time. (Page 23)
Given enough time in the environment, you eventually build a mental representation of the place. You no longer need a physical map to know where you’re going, since you’ve created a sort of internal map of the place. 2 You know where you are relative to other parts of the environment, because you’ve internalized the parts of the environment and the relationships between them. As a result, you also become more adept at making predictions about what you’re likely to find next. (Page 24)
How do you experience a city as pedestrian-friendly? The environment in such a place offers cues that tell you what you can and can’t do there. These cues are called affordances, a concept introduced by psychologist J. J. Gibson in the 1960s. Gibson and his collaborator and wife Eleanor were interested in how organisms sense their environments. He coined the word affordance to describe how elements of an environment communicate the possibilities for action they afford to organisms that are capable of undertaking such actions. For example, to a being with opposable thumbs, a tree branch affords grasping. (Page 24)
affordances are not inherent characteristics of objects. They only pertain to the relationship between an object and an agent in the environment. A chair that affords seating to you provides completely different affordances to an E. coli bacterium. To the bacterium—a microscopic organism with a completely different mechanical configuration and sensory apparatus—a chair does not afford seating. (Page 25)
The information conveyed by the book’s cover is an example of a signifier, “some sort of indicator, some signal in the physical or social world that can be interpreted meaningfully” in Don Norman’s definition. (Page 25)
How You Know What You Can Do There
Postman argued that effective communication required a shared understanding of the social relations between the agents that participated in an interaction, their goals in the interaction, and the particular vocabulary they used when interacting. He called this set of conditions “the semantic environment the agents were operating in.” (Page 26)
Microsoft Word is a general-purpose application; its potential user base is anyone who needs to write something. That’s a very broad remit! Because of this, Word’s designers need to be careful with the language they select so that it’s common enough to be broadly understood, yet particular enough so that users know what they can do in the various parts of the application. (Page 29)
the words you use in the navigation systems and headings of websites not only help you find what you’re looking for, but they also help you understand what you’re looking at. (Page 30)
You Are Here
While you don’t experience them as physical places, websites and apps are also environments. The user interface of a word processor creates a context that affects how you think about what you can do within it, much as a church or a library does. This context is a semantic environment that influences your thinking and behavior. When you’re working in a word processor, processing words is what you do. Those words end up in a document that you save in a filesystem, which is another semantic environment that has been established by a software user interface. It’s context all the way down! (Page 31)
Incentives
Types of Incentives
As Steve Jobs said, “Incentive structures work. So you have to be very careful of what you incent people to do, because various incentive structures create all sorts of consequences that you can’t anticipate.” (Page 37)
For incentives to influence your behavior, you must have the freedom and ability to act in some ways and not others. If you can’t effectively choose one course of action over another, you can’t be incentivized. (Page 37)